Minolta 70W Riva Zoom – Results – Photography, Images and Cameras

Icy Roaring Brook

I described my experience using my February film camera in February film camera – Minolta 70W Riva Zoom. I now have the results back so how did it come out?

First I was right that the first six frames had been taken by the friend who have given me the camera. There was a nice picture of a young woman sitting in a pool of light, playing with some toys; a picture of my friend’s father; and a quite spectacular picture of my friend with a very colorful, almost psychedelic vignette. I don’t even know how you’d achieve this effect. It looks like lens flare or a light leak, but it extends around all of the edges of the frame. The final three pictures included another, less successful, picture of the woman in the pool of light and a couple of pictures attempting to capture fast moving kids.

On to the pictures I took. I mentioned in the earlier post that the film was old. My friends’ pictures confirmed this. However, I don’t think it was as old as I thought it was i.e. probably more like 15 years than 25 years. I think the age had caused some deterioration of the film itself with some of the negatives showing actual damage. There were also some strange colors. At first I thought this was also because of the age, but then I came across a frame that had been taken in bright sunlight and the colors were fine. I’m guessing that the very contrasty, snowy content of most of the pictures was too much for this camera. The bright snow probably caused the camera to badly underexpose and the combination of the likely budget film (Black’s Astral) and the attempt to recover the underexposure caused the poor colors/contrast. Anyway I wasn’t able to correct the colors, so I decided to convert the images to black and white. The results are below. Not the best I’ve ever seen, but not the worst either. I imagine that for the point and shoot audience for which it as intended i.e. taking snapshots outside in sunny weather it was probably adequate as long as you don’t take it out of its comfort zone.

Using it was a fun experiment, but I don’t see myself taking it out again.